


The River Is Always My Home

by BetsyByron



Category: Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi | Spirited Away
Genre: Years Later
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-27
Updated: 2012-12-27
Packaged: 2017-11-22 15:15:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/611231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BetsyByron/pseuds/BetsyByron
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Six years ago, Chihiro had a strange dream...</p>
            </blockquote>





	The River Is Always My Home

**Author's Note:**

> This was written a few years ago, and just recently translated from the original French, so please forgive potential clumsiness!  
> Hope you enjoy.  
> Soundtrack: The Water by Johnny Flynn and Laura Marling

Chihiro pulled on her skirt again, embarrassed that most of the male customers in the restaurant were looking their way. Nami smacked her hand.

“Will you stop it?” She whispered. “You can try all you want, you’re not going to make yourself any less pretty.”

Chihiro rested her head on her hands, facing the wall and prepared to sulk for a little while. She would never have thought, when she had been accepted in the high-school of her choice, that her main problem would be the length of the uniform skirt. The other girls seemed to be perfectly fine with it. 

Among her friends, Nami was the daring kind, spiking the look with colourful socks and legwarmers in spite of the teachers’ repeated tell-offs; Kimiko, with her endless legs, would make you think the uniform was modelled on her – that was how good she looked in it. Satomi, chubby as she was, danced so often and with so much heart her skirt looked alive. 

But Chihiro, too shy still to embrace the pretty and slender young woman she had become, was always afraid that a gush of wind would suddenly reveal her underwear, or that boys might stare at her thighs. 

Nami did not let her be sullen for long, counter-attacking. 

“Chi, are you going to say yes to Nitoshiwa?”

Chihiro turned back to her friends, who were all looking at her with a malicious smile waiting for her answer, and she crinkled her nose. Minoru Nitoshiwa was a nice boy – calm and serious, for once – but something held her back which she couldn’t exactly put her finger on.

“I’m not in love with him.” She said flatly. 

“Who said anything about love!” Kimiko laughed. “You’ll have plenty of time to get to know him if you let him take you out. He’s a decent guy, he won’t force you to do anything you’re not comfortable with.”

“Decent, but not boring.” Satomi added. “That’s rare in a boy. And he’s cu~te...”

Chihiro shrugged.

“I don’t know. I’ll see on Monday.”

The girls did not insist, and the conversation drifted off to other topics. Chihiro lost track of what they were talking about after a few minutes. Through the window, she was watching the rain fall.

*

Nami yawned – she had run out of anecdotes to tell, and the bus still wasn’t there. She stretched, her whole figure changing for a moment, and smiled to her friend.

“It must be stuck by another landslide up around the train station.” She decided. “Shall we walk? The rain has stopped.”

Chihiro accepted, vaguely thinking about how her mother would tell her she was wearing out her shoes too quickly and she wouldn’t get a new pair until the end of the year whatsoever. She didn’t really care. She liked walking with Nami.

As they crossed the main street, a series of minor events put her completely off. First, children who were running around, and a mother calling a name she turned at – “Sen!”. When she said, honestly, that she didn’t know why she had reacted, Nami mocked her gently. 

Then she thought the saw a familiar face in the corner of her eye, without associating it to any name – and when she turned it had gone. 

Then it started raining again. 

Nami complained joyfully, but Chihiro felt the rain slip under her clothes and freeze her skin and as deep as her heart. She felt like she was on the edge of a dream, on the edge of a memory, one that was escaping her but refused to fade completely. Haku, she thought.

“Haku?” Nami repeated.

Apparently she had thought out loud. She shook her head slowly. 

“When I was little, I fell into a river...” she whispered.

She shook her head again. She didn’t know what she was saying anymore, or why this old story came to her mind now. Nami shot her a worried look.

“Chi, you okay?”

Chihiro took a moment to analyse what she was feeling.

“I feel like I’m forgetting something important.” She finally said. “Something really important, and I can’t...”

She sighed. Nami did her best with a few comforting words, and told her to get some rest when she left her at the crossroad. 

*

The rain stopped as she was reaching her block, and she turned to cast a look around her. The street was empty, wet, and bathed in a blue light which, at last, soothed her. 

Until she felt as if someone had just brushed past her – and the street was just as empty as before. On edge, when she thought she heard a whisper – forget... – she stared shouting.

“What do you want, goddamnit!”

She wasn’t sure who she was talking to. Maybe she believed in spirits, in some part of her mind.

For a few minutes, only silence.

And then a figure, a few meters from her suddenly, standing in a puddle of water – or on a puddle of water. His feet did not seem to disturb its surface. She did not turn her head, she kept the stranger there in the corner of her eye for a while, just enough to watch him without seeing him. Then she closed her eyes. Dreams were spinning round and round in her head. Nothing made sense.

When she opened her eyes, the silhouette was gone. 

*

Unease stuck with her for several days. She had this weird feeling that she was missing something, that she was incomplete, out of place. She knew the answers were there, just below the shell of her memories, but she couldn’t bring back to reality any of them. It all seemed to drown in the ephemeral substance of dreams.

Until he was standing in front of the school.

A thin boy, with an angular face, very black hair, straight and cut at the shoulders. He was hardly taller than her and held himself with a strange sort of majesty, a great – too great – maturity. His face was not expressing anything, his eyes were cold, but it seemed to Chihiro, even from a few meters away, that his gaze was burning holes in her skin. Haku, she thought, a thought that seemed to burst through on its own accord. River, dragon. For God’s sake, what I am going on about?

“Chihiro?” Nami called next to her. “You’re white as a sheet, are you alright?”

Chihiro tried to nod, fixing her eyes on her shoes to stop seeing this boy, so strange yet so familiar, who made her blood run cold and her cheeks burn. 

But suddenly he was right before her.

“Chihiro.” He whispered.

Nami gasped at such unexpected directness; Satomi chuckled, and Kimiko nudged her. Chihiro shook her head, as if she was trying to fight back memories, dreams, tumbling at the edge of her mind without finding their way out. 

“Step back.” Nami ordered the boy. “She’s not feeling well, now’s not a good time.”

He did not move away, instead extended his hand, and touched the tip of his cold fingers on Chihiro’s wrist.

Everything came back to her with the effect of a bucket of icy water. Everything she had been careful to bury deep, convincing herself it had only just been a strange dream – everything, even this boy whose memory was sad and made her feel she missed a part. Especially this boy.

She muffled a sob in her hand, before she threw her arms around his neck, almost instinctively, almost as if she had been waiting for this, only for this, for six years. She actually had, she thought, feeling his arms close around her, the warmth of his neck, the softness of the hair that brushed her cheek, the smile in his voice when he whispered he had missed her.

Eventually, he stepped out of her arms gently, maybe because, as she noticed then, her friends’ jaws were all on the floor. Haku bowed ever so slightly.

“My name is Kohaku.” He introduced himself. “I am...a childhood friend of Chihiro’s.”

Nami was the first to pull herself together, and smile a big bright smile.

“Nami Anoka.” She replied. “And here’s Kimiko Haruteru, and Satomi Karakesu. Her best friends. How long had it been since you’d seen each other?”

Haku turned to Chihiro, as if he didn’t know the answer to that.

“Six years.” She said, observing his reaction.

His face did not express any particular emotion, but she saw in his eyes that time hadn’t been running the same way for him.

“You must have a lot of catching up to do then.” Nami decided, pushing Satomi and Kimiko forward. “We’ll leave you to it. See you tomorrow, Chi!”

She winked, and Chihiro couldn’t stop a smile. Nami was always thinking in terms of potential boyfriends, and this one sure had all the physical prerequisites. Of course, she didn’t know he was a river god, but that was another story.

Haku took her hand, and god or not, she had missed him and it didn’t matter.

“I’m back.” He murmured with a smile.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading :)


End file.
